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TinyTrak and Tripmate Interfacing

I finally figured out what was keeping my TinyTrak from working with my Tripmate. I had to connect the RS-232 connection as a DCE device and I knew that the RX and TX pins were connected together inside the Tripmate, which is a required mod to get the tripmate to send out packets even without the mapping program on the PC. What I had forgotten was that I disconnected the wire coming from the PC board to the cable. Therefore, while I was thinking that the TX and RX were available and connected together, they were not. To complicate matters, the Tripmate that I modified requires that pin 4 be held at 5V to turn on. I made sure this was the case by using a voltmeter to check it, but I failed to realize that my null modem moved it to pin 6. Whenever I have trouble with RS-232, I slip in the null modem and everything begins to work. However, in this case, the null modem also turned off the Tripmate so nothing was coming out of it. Now that I have everything figured out, I just need to begin to make up plans for my various installations.